The Eternal Drama

THE STORY of Dionysus’ beginnings is remarkable for his difficulty in coming into the world. Conceived in the union of Zeus and the mortal woman Semele, he fell victim to jealous Hera even before he was born. Knowing what the consequences of her advice would be, Hera persuaded Semele, who was already six months pregnant, to insist that her mysterious lover reveal himself to her in his true form. When she did so, she was destroyed by the sight of Zeus in his full power. “It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living god.”¹ Zeus plucked the unborn child from Semele’s body and sewed him up in his thigh, where Dionysus spent the three remaining months. Shortly following his birth as a horned infant crowned with serpents, and again at the instigation of Hera, he was torn to pieces by the Titans from which he derived the name Zagreus, meaning approximately “dismembered.” His body was then consumed by the Titans except for his heart, which was recovered and from which he was reconstituted and reborn. Entrusted finally to the charge of Persephone, he was more protected and in fact grew up in various situations in the company of protective women and nymphs. As an adult, he was described as somewhat feminine in appearance and he went always in the company of groups of Maenads (the word means “mad women”) who had become his devotees.

Dionysus was a wanderer, traveling through the world with the bands of Maenads, setting up his worship and bringing the culture of grapes and wine. He is pictured as a beautiful young man draped in a fawn skin, holding the thyrsus, a staff or wand made of a fennel stalk wound with ivy. His rituals were held in the woods, in uncivilized nature. He was associated with the bull and with serpents, the imagery pointing to his wildness and his power, and to his place outside the bounds of civilized order. Thought of as “the God who comes,” he would appear unexpectedly in a new place, bringing excitement, joy, and terror, and changing what was there before.

The classic account of Dionysus is to be found in Euripides’ The Bacchae. In this play, he comes to Thebes and what he brings with him destroys the status quo. When King Pentheus of Thebes returned to his kingdom to find that Dionysus and his followers were holding ecstatic celebrations in the woods and that many of the local people, especially the women, were joining them, he was outraged and vowed to lock up the revelers and punish Dionysus. The authority or power principle stiffens and becomes vengeful in the face of Dionysian wildness. When Dionysus appeared to him, Pentheus defied the wild god and tried to lock him up, but after the king had him bound with knotted ropes and deposited in his stables, a bull was discovered in his place. Dionysus had slipped through his fingers. Pentheus gradually turned mad himself, under the influence of the appearing and disappearing god, finally attempting to spy on the Bacchic revelers in the woods, where he was discovered and torn to pieces by the crazed devotees, who included his own mother. Two old wise men of the city, Teiresias, the blind seer, and Cadmus, the former king, decided, as aged as they were, to join the celebrations in the woods; they knew that everyone must honor Dionysus and could feel the invigorating power of his presence. Teiresias says:

The two old men returned safely from the revels, but not so the king who had refused to honor Dionysus—one need not become possessed by the god, only respectfully acknowledge him, perhaps risking one’s dignity.

What Dionysus brings is wild, spontaneous, inspired behavior. If Apollo signifies measure and mean, Dionysus symbolizes excess and the value and significance of excess. There is ecstasy on the one hand and terror on the other, and the whole potential for inner transformation. He is connected to rapture, to the release of everything that has been locked up, to the blaze of life, but also to persecution, suffering, and death, and to madness. He is associated with Persephone, the queen of the Underworld. He brings wisdom in a sudden flash, epiphany, and also the suddenly recognized truth that can lead to madness. Where he is, things change.

What actually occurred in the Dionysian rites is not altogether known, but a certain amount of information is accumulated in Jane Harrison’s book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. She describes, for instance, the rite of omophagia, the ritual eating of raw flesh, which is alluded to in a fragment of a lost play of Euripides, where this is written:

The Bacchoi hold orgies in honor of a mad Dionysus, they celebrate a divine madness by the Eating of Raw Flesh, the final accomplishment of their rite is the distribution of the flesh of butchered victims, they are crowned with snakes, and shriek out the name of Eva . . . and the symbol of their Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent.⁴

Usually a bull or a goat representing the god was dismembered in a ritual reenactment of the dismemberment of the infant Dionysus, and the raw and bleeding flesh was then distributed and eaten by all the participants, who thus took on the role of the Titans.

In punishment for the Titans’ dismemberment of Dionysus, Zeus had hurled a thunderbolt at them, which had reduced them to dust, but that dust had little sparks of Dionysus scattered in it because they had all eaten him, and that Titan dust was later used to make human beings. Hence, we are made out of Titan dust with the Dionysian spark in us that is left over from the Titans’ meal. Such was the mythical story the omophagian rite reenacted.

What would such a rite represent psychologically? It certainly echoes totem meals that we know of in various societies, and it is a remarkable, if crude, parallel to the Christian Eucharist. If the Dionysian principle can be thought of as a primordial dynamism, the experience of dismemberment would correspond to a voluntary breaking up of elemental psychic or spiritual energy, to make it available for the emerging conscious ego. There are subtle and profound ideas implied in the image.

The dismemberment of Dionysus was the subject of much theological speculation by the Neoplatonists. Proclus, one of their most prolific writers, spoke about the symbolic meaning of the fact that the infant Dionysus was playing with a mirror at the time he was seized by the Titans and dismembered. Proclus saw this as indicating that the heavenly Dionysus caught sight of his image in the mirror of matter, went forth toward it with desire, and was thus confined in matter, incarnated.⁵ He became a divisible soul, one made of separate parts or personalities and thus was subject to dismemberment by the Titans. We are confronted here with the complicated problem that has occupied philosophers since the beginning of human thought, the problem of unity versus multiplicity. Proclus expressed the idea that Dionysus represented original unity, which sees its image in the mirror of matter, and, out of the desire to be incarnated or to be born into real spatio-temporal existence, submits itself to multiplicity, to being broken up into specific parts in time and space. Psychologically, this refers to becoming an ego. To the extent that egohood is born, one becomes a multiplicity, since one must pay attention to concrete reality, which is not a unity, but a multiplicity. The conflicting demands that result tear us apart in different directions. Life in the flesh is multiple; singleness belongs in the transcendental realm.

The well-known verses of Shelley allude to this same problem. These are from his poem “Adonais”:

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity, . . . ⁶

We could say that Dionysus is the white radiance of eternity that voluntarily submits to dismemberment, fragmentation, refraction into specific colors in order to generate the particular colors of light and of actual existence, rather than just remaining eternal white unity.

The ritual of the feast of the raw flesh, at the same time, bears a close relationship with Communion symbolism. As reenacted in the Mass, Christ experienced sacrifice and dismemberment in order that he become food for the believers, just as Dionysus in the guise of the animal served that function in the more primitive rite. Dionysus suffered incarnation and dismemberment just as Christ suffered it with the Crucifixion and with the symbolic dismemberment of the Last Supper, at which he breaks the bread he calls his body. In a medieval woodcut of the Crucifixion reproduced in Alan Watts’s book, Myth and Ritual in Christianity, dismembered arms and legs are shown hanging on the cross, indicating that these two images, crucifixion and dismemberment, can be equated.⁷ It seems that the divinity, or the archetypal psyche, permits itself to become manifest and endures fragmentation in order to promote life. This dream of a young man alludes to that point:

I dreamed that I saw a modern Christ figure who was traveling in a bus with a group of disciples. Then I sensed that there was danger. The man was going to be betrayed. It happened and the bus rocked with violence. The figure was set upon and subdued. They had apparently tied ropes to each of his hands and feet and had pulled him tight, spread-eagled in four directions. I knew they would kill him that way. [There was going to be a quartering, a dismemberment.] Then it appeared, when I looked at him more closely, that he was not tied by the hands, but was grasping with each hand a wooden bar attached to the rope. He was cooperating in his own death. At the end of the dream came an image of a magnetic field of force showing the forces pulling him apart in the four directions, making a cross with the field of force between the four poles.

Here is a dream of dismemberment, which is clearly a profound process, as well as a sacred one since it is associated with religious ritual. It should be noted that the archetype or the deity itself is subject to this dismemberment, not the ego.

Creativity is an aspect of Dionysus, and one of particular psychological importance. It is not a deliberate Hephaestian creativity, but creativity in the inspired, almost intoxicated, sense, in which the unconscious wells up. It corresponds to the way Nietzsche said he wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra; while he tramped the mountains of the Engadine, Zarathustra shouted in his ear. That is Dionysus, that is Dionysian creativity, and Nietzsche is probably the outstanding example of Dionysian possession. Following his mental breakdown, at times he signed himself “Crucified,” at times “Dionysus,” at times “Zagreus,” showing how close certain aspects of the myth of Christ are to the myth of Dionysus. Jung has written on the subject of identification with the creative principle in his seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. He talks about the creative powers as they manifested themselves in Nietzsche:

[The creative forces] have you on the string and you dance to their whistling, to their melody. But inasmuch as you say that these creative forces are in Nietzsche or in me or anywhere else, you cause an inflation, because man does not possess creative powers, he is possessed by them. . . . If he allows himself to be thoroughly possessed by them without questioning, without looking at them, there is no inflation, but the moment he splits off, when he thinks “I am the fellow” an inflation follows. . . . [It can only be avoided] by obeying completely without attempting to look at yourself. You must be quite naive. [But] It happens automatically that you become conscious of yourself and then you are gone; it is as if you had touched a high-tension wire. . . . Nietzsche of course could not help looking at the thing and then he was overwhelmed with resentments, because the creative powers steal your time, sap your strength, and what is the result? A book perhaps. But where is your personal life? All gone. Therefore, such people feel so terribly cheated; they mind it, and everybody ought to kneel down before them in order to make up for that which has been stolen by God. . . . If you know you are creative and enjoy being creative, you will be crucified afterwards, because anybody identified with God will be dismembered. An old father of the church, the Bishop Synesius said that the spiritus phantasticus, man’s creative spirit, can penetrate the depths or the heights of the universe like God or like a great demon, but on account of that, he will also have to undergo the divine punishment. That would be the dismemberment of Dionysus or the crucifixion of Christ.⁸

So people who are intoxicated by some creative effort should be warned that the only safe creativity is that which makes one uncomfortable. If one feels burdened down with every sentence one writes or every brush stroke comes with an effort, then one is safe and not in danger of falling, one is already down. But otherwise, to identify with Dionysus has the opposite danger, and Nietzsche is an appalling example of this.

These reflections help us to understand the psychological effect of communion symbolism, whether it be the rite of the raw flesh in more primitive times or the modern Christian communion. One effect of participating in the ritual would be to spare the participant the fate of God. It protects one from identification with the inner creative powers, since by acting out the role of the communicant, the receiver of the divine nourishment, one is taking on a humble position and is thus protected against inflation.

The central symbol of Dionysus is the grape, the product of which is wine and the essence of which is alcohol. Early man was profoundly impressed by the effects of alcohol. It is indeed a mysterious and miraculous substance, which when drunk, changes the personality; it has a true power of transformation that led early people to believe that wine contained a spirit. This is why alcoholic beverages are still called “spirits” and why the Latin name for whiskey is spiritus frumenti, the spirit of the grain. This remarkable substance lends itself to the projection of profound psychological imagery and Dionysus is the name of the mysterious transforming spirit that is symbolized by its effects. By extension, it is the principle of creativity, life renewal, and the unpredictable qualities of the spirit as such, the spirit that blows where it will. In this symbolic sense, the verses of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat become a hymn not to banal, vulgar alcohol but to the spirit of Dionysus and what that represents psychologically. For example:

You know, my Friends, how long since in my House

For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

And:

The Grape that can with Logic absolute

The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute;

The subtle Alchemist that in a Trice

Life’s leaden Metal into Gold transmute.⁹

Here wine, along with what it symbolizes, is equated with the elixir vitae or aqua permanens of the alchemist.^a In Christian psychology, the Dionysian principle was largely relegated to the devil and so lived, at least in part, an underground existence. But we see Dionysus as he was starting to emerge in the modern mind in John Milton’s poem “Comus.” Identified by Milton as the son of Circe and Dionysus, Comus is pictured as a kind of degraded Dionysian figure, who lived in a dark wood where he accosted travelers and offered them his wine in a crystal goblet. The effect of the wine was to turn them partly into beasts. Here is Milton’s description:

[He] excels his mother [Circe] at her mighty art,

Offering to every weary traveller

His orient liquor in a crystal glass,

To quench the drouth of Phoebus; which, as they taste

(For most do taste through fond intemperate thirst),

Soon as the potion works, their human countenance,

The express resemblance of the gods, is changed

Into some brutish form of wolf, or bear,

Or ounce, or tiger, hog, or bearded goat,

All other parts remaining as they were;

And they, so perfect is their misery,

Not once perceive their foul disfigurement,

But boast themselves more comely than before;

And all their friends and native home forget,

To roll with pleasure in a sensual sty.¹⁰

The unconscious in its spontaneous aspect still has here a largely negative cast. However, something new is introduced when a chaste lady gets lost in Comus’ woods, is rescued barely in time, and fails to succumb to his temptation. Then the poet reveals that he speaks for an age of transition, because although his Comus is still evil, Milton puts the best lines in Comus’ mouth, prompting William Blake to say about Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is that he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”¹¹

Although the chaste lady refuses Comus’ wine, he replies to her:

Oh, foolishness of men! That lend their ears

To those budge doctors of the Stoic fur,

And fetch their precepts from the Cynic tub,

Praising the lean and sallow abstinence.

Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth

With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,

Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks,

Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,

But all to please and sate the curious taste?

And set to work millions of spinning worms,

That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk

To deck her sons; and that no corner might

Be vacant of her plenty, in her own loins

She hutched the all-worshipped ore, and precious gems

To store her children with: if all the world

Should in a pet of temperance feed on pulse,

Drink the clear stream, and nothing wear but frieze,

The All-giver would be unthanked, would be unpraised,

Not half his riches known, and yet despised;

And we should serve him as a grudging master,

As a penurious niggard of his wealth,

And live like Nature’s bastards, not her sons,

Who would be quite surcharged with her own weight

And strangled with her waste fertility;

The earth cumbered and the winged air darked with plumes,

The herds would over-multitude their lords,

The sea o’er fraught would swell, and the unsought diamonds

Would so emblaze the forehead of the deep

And so bestud with stars, that they below

Would grow inured to light, and come at last

To gaze upon the sun with shameless brows.

Getting back to the point, he says:

List, lady, be not coy and be not cozened

With that same vaunted name, virginity.

Beauty is Nature’s coin, must not be hoarded. . . . ¹²

Milton is thus expressing the intriguing idea that to spurn the Dionysian wine and not to avail ourselves of what nature has to offer constitutes hybris, because it means that all the diamonds of the deep then go uncollected, so to speak, and the deep can’t tell itself apart from the sky.

The appearance of the Dionysian principle in dreams is not uncommon and some of the most powerful Dionysian dreams are dreamt by clergymen, which, given the law of opposites, is not surprising: those most affected by the repression of the Dionysian principle would be just the ones whose unconscious could be expected to present it in most vivid form. For example, Jung, in Psychology and Alchemy, tells of a clergyman dreaming that on entering his church one night, he found that the whole wall of the choir has collapsed. The altar and ruins are overgrown with vines hanging full of grapes and the moon is shining in through the gap.¹³

Here is another Dionysian dream in abbreviated form:

I am to celebrate communion. In the sacristy, which looks like a kitchen, the communion wine is to be prepared by mixing two separate wines, a dark blue wine and a red wine. The latter is in a bottle with a yellow label that looks like a Scotch label and is marked “Paul.” Two men are sitting at a round table. One is a political leftist, the other a rightist. Up to now they have maintained a facade of social amenity, but now they are becoming hostile to one another. I suggest that they ventilate their reactions and resolve their feeling relationship. At this point, the scene darkens as in a theater play and a red-yellow spotlight focuses on a small table between and behind the two men. On the table is a bottle of the warm red wine with the Scotch label clearly marked “Paul.” Then there is total darkness and the tinkle of glasses sounding as though they have been clinked and perhaps broken. The sense is obvious in the dream. I think, they’ve drunk the red wine in their discussion attaining comradeship, become drunk in the process, fallen asleep and dropped their glasses. My response is delight in the aesthetic way in which this has been portrayed and anxiety about the fact that the service needs to begin and we do not now have the ingredients for the communion wine.

One might think of the two kinds of wine, a blue wine and a red, as signifying the spirit of Logos, or heaven, on one hand, and the spirit of earth, or Eros, on the other. The impression is given that there are two different degrees of reconciliation to be achieved and the higher degree would be the communion service with the mixed wine, which is not reached yet. A lesser union takes place first, the union of opposites of the two men, the rightist and the leftist, through their getting drunk on the red wine. This corresponds to a kind of reconciliation with the shadow, or a union of opposites on the shadow level; the anima component is not present. Demonstrating an important aspect of Dionysian symbolism, this particular image tells us that Dionysus and what he signifies promotes a sense of communion with humanity and a dissolution of differences—a quality of the Dionysian that has been expressed by Nietzsche in a passage from his essay The Birth of Tragedy:

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Freely, earth proffers her gifts and peacefully the beasts of prey of the rocks and desert approach. The chariot of Dionysus is covered with flowers and garlands; panthers and tigers walk under its yoke. Transform Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck—then you will approach the Dionysian. Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice or “impudent convention” have fixed between man and man, are broken. Now with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn aside, and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity.¹⁴

The Dionysian effect of dissolving all differences and promoting the primordial unity is likewise an attribute of the blood of Christ, according to Paul. Take, for instance, this passage:

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end.¹⁵

What is spoken of by Paul is precisely the effect that the red wine labeled “Paul” had in the dream. However, there are two ways of taking this breakdown of all dividing lines and reconciliation of all differences and return to primordial unity. Taken purely externally it can amount to a regression to unconscious collective identification and the phenomenon of mob psychology. But taken as referring to an inner process, it signifies the unification and harmonizing of the individual personality.

Certainly the wine of Dionysus symbolizes a powerful but paradoxical content, like the spirit Mercurius in alchemical symbolism, which is poisonous to some at certain times and healing to others at other times. Not for nothing did Christianity relegate Dionysus to the devil. However, when his time has come, when he is truly knocking on the gates of one’s city of Thebes, then to deny the Dionysian principle is a grave mistake, although to embrace it superficially and frivolously can also be unwise—a fact strikingly indicated by the symbolic implications of Paul’s statement in First Corinthians, in which he says:

. . . anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be guilty of desecrating the body and blood of the Lord. A man must test himself before eating his share of the bread and drinking from the cup. For he who eats and drinks eats and drinks judgment on himself if he does not discern the Body.¹⁶

“The Body” here refers to discerning the deity he is incorporating, with the realization that there is indeed a sacred nature. Only with that awareness can the creativity and spontaneity of the psyche be realized without either an infantile regression or a presumptuous inflation. To return to the words of Euripides, we could say as Dionysus says in the The Bacchae, “[I come] establishing my mysteries and rites that I might be revealed on earth for what I am, a god.”¹⁷

a. This imagery is further developed in my book Ego and Archetype, pp. 235ff.

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Dionysus